In The Shadow of Yesterday

The summer of 1877 didn’t show up without warning. Anyone paying attention had seen it coming for four years.

In September 1873, the banking firm of Jay Cooke & Company collapsed, overextended on railroad bonds, as it turned out, and set off a financial panic that cascaded through the American economy with a speed that left no sector untouched.

What followed was not the brief recession Americans had grown accustomed to. It was something different. Longer. Deeper.

The Long Depression, as it came to be called, ran for 65 months; the longest economic contraction in the nation’s history, a record it would hold until people stopped checking, because by then the Great Depression had arrived to make everyone forget about the previous one.

The railroads were both the cause and the primary casualty, which tells you a little something about how 19th century American markets worked.

In the five years following the Civil War, more than 30,000 miles of new track had been laid across the country; a speculative frenzy that required enormous amounts of borrowed money and produced enormous amounts of excess capacity.

When Cooke’s firm went under, it took the financing for the Northern Pacific Railroad with it, and the whole overbuilt, over-leveraged structure started to shake. More than a hundred railroads closed in the first year.

New track construction fell from 7,500 miles in 1872 to 1,600 miles by 1875. Iron and steel production dropped as much as 45 percent. Eighteen thousand businesses failed between 1873 and 1875 alone. A million or more Americans lost their jobs.

By 1876, 76 railroad companies had gone bankrupt or entered receivership. The number of organized labor unions in the country had fallen from 30 to 9. Workers who still had jobs had spent four years watching their wages get cut, and cut again, with no mechanism to push back and no organization strong enough to try.

Here is where the railroads become interesting, or rather, where they become the story. They were the largest employer in the country outside of agriculture. They had received enormous federal land grants to build their lines. They were, by any standard, the spine of the American economy.

They were also the most hated institutions in working-class America, despised not just by their own workers but by nearly everyone who depended on them; which, by 1877, was most of the country.

Farmers who needed them for shipping, small cities that felt squeezed by their freight rates, workers who’d watched executives accumulate staggering wealth while the men running the actual trains went hungry. The resentment was broad and it was not irrational.

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad made the contradiction as obvious as it could possibly be made. Over three years starting in 1874, the B&O cut wages repeatedly, until by 1877 its workers were earning barely more than half of what they’d made before the Panic.

Then, in July of that year, the railroad’s president announced another 10 percent cut was necessary because the depression was, in his words, “seriously affecting the usual earnings of railway companies.” He wanted to keep paying the same dividends to shareholders. The workers would cover the difference.

That sentence is the whole story, really. The men running the trains would earn less so that the men owning the trains could earn the same. It was not a complicated arrangement, and nobody pretended otherwise.

What nobody anticipated, least of all the railroad presidents, was what happened next.

Martinsburg: The Match

There is something almost accidental about how it started; no union leadership, no coordinated plan, no confrontation, no manifesto. Just a group of men in a rail yard in a small West Virginia town who decided they’d had enough.

On July 14, 1877, workers at the B&O station in Martinsburg, West Virginia got word that another 10 percent wage cut was taking effect. They’d already absorbed cut after cut over the previous three years. This one was the last straw, or, more precisely, this one was the match.

The firemen and brakemen uncoupled every locomotive in the station, rolled them into the roundhouse, and made their position clear: no freight trains were moving until the cut was rescinded.

It was a simple, targeted action. Passenger trains, which carried the U.S. mail, were waved through without interference. The strikers weren’t trying to shut down the country. They were trying to make one railroad feel the cost of its own decisions.

West Virginia’s governor, Henry Matthews, sent in the militia. It didn’t work, for a reason that would repeat itself across the country over the next two weeks: the militiamen were railroad workers themselves, or had family who were. They weren’t going to fix bayonets on their neighbors.

Two of West Virginia’s four organized militia units openly mutinied and sympathized with the strikers. The rest proved equally useless to those in power.

When a militiaman tried to operate a switch and a striker confronted him, shots were exchanged. The striker died, the soldier was wounded, and even then, the crews and their uniformed escorts abandoned the effort and walked away. Nobody was willing to kill for the B&O’s dividend payments.

Matthews wired President Rutherford B. Hayes for federal troops. Hayes complied.

The troops were available, as it happened, because Reconstruction had just ended; the soldiers who had been stationed across the South enforcing the rights of black Americans had been pulled out as part of the political deal that put Hayes in the White House just months earlier.

They were now available to protect railroad property in West Virginia. If the irony registered in Washington, nobody mentioned it publicly.

The federal troops arrived and got the Martinsburg yard moving again. But by then, it didn’t matter. The strike had already jumped the fence.

In the days since the Martinsburg walkout, word had traveled up and down the B&O line by telegraph, by word of mouth, by the simple fact that railroaders everywhere were reading the same news and asking themselves the same question. If the men in Martinsburg could stop the trains, what would happen if everyone did?

They were about to find out.

Baltimore: The Pattern Emerges

Baltimore didn’t wait for Martinsburg to be resolved. By July 16, the same day the B&O cut took effect, the strike was already spreading along the main line.

Within days it had reached Camden Station, the B&O’s hub in Baltimore, and the city was about to demonstrate the problem that would haunt every governor, every railroad president, and eventually the White House over the next two weeks.

The Maryland National Guard had two regiments in the city. The Fifth marched south toward Camden Station without much trouble. The Sixth wasn’t so lucky.

To reach the depot, it had to fight its way west through streets packed with sympathetic Baltimoreans; railroad workers, dockworkers, factory hands, and ordinary residents who had their own reasons to despise the railroads and weren’t inclined to step aside for the men sent to protect them.

Rocks flew. The crowd surged. By the time the Sixth Regiment reached Camden, it had been mauled.

What happened next set the template. The militia, outnumbered and under pressure, opened fire. When it was over, ten civilians were dead and twenty-five were wounded. The governor wired Hayes. Hayes sent 2,000 federal troops and 600 Marines to Baltimore to restore order.

It worked, in the narrow sense; the trains eventually moved again in Baltimore. But the episode had revealed something that couldn’t be unseen. Local militia units were unreliable.

Not because they were cowards, but because they lived in the same neighborhoods, attended the same churches, and drank in the same saloons as the men they were being asked to suppress. Asking a militiaman to shoot a striker was, in many cases, asking him to shoot his brother-in-law. Some did it anyway. Many wouldn’t.

This was the structural problem of 1877, and it would drive every decision that followed. If you couldn’t trust local forces to do the job, you had to bring in outsiders. And outsiders, as Pittsburgh was about to prove, had a way of making everything dramatically worse.

Pittsburgh: The Explosion

Pittsburgh was already angry before the first striker walked off the job.

The Pennsylvania Railroad had dominated the city for decades, and not in ways Pittsburghers appreciated. The railroad’s freight rates were widely believed to favor Philadelphia shippers over Pittsburgh ones, a grievance with real financial consequences.

When John D. Rockefeller shifted his Standard Oil transport to pipelines and closed his Pittsburgh plants, the PRR’s revenue took a serious hit. Thomas Scott, the railroad’s president, responded the way railroad presidents responded to everything: he cut wages.

The men running his trains would cover the shortfall. They’d been covering shortfalls for four years.

Tom Scott is worth a moment of your time.

He was one of the most powerful men in America; a former Assistant Secretary of War and close associate of Abraham Lincoln, mentor to a young Andrew Carnegie, and the driving force behind the Compromise of 1877, the backroom deal that settled the disputed presidential election in Rutherford Hayes’s favor in exchange for pulling federal troops out of the South and ending Reconstruction.

Scott had essentially installed Hayes in the White House. Months later, his Pittsburgh rail yards would burn to the ground, and he would be complaining that Hayes hadn’t sent troops fast enough. History has a sense of humor, even when it isn’t funny.

On July 16, the same day the B&O cut took effect in Martinsburg, the Pennsylvania Railroad informed its western division (Pittsburgh) employees that eastbound trains to Altoona would henceforth run as “double-headers”: two locomotives pulling twice the normal load of cars, with no additional crew.

Fewer workers needed, more dangerous work for the ones who remained, same pay. The timing could not have been worse. Word of Martinsburg was already moving up and down the lines by telegraph.

On the morning of July 19, an eastbound freight sat in the Pittsburgh yards waiting to depart. Its flagman, a man named Gus Harris, refused to take it out. He didn’t issue a statement. He didn’t call a meeting. He just wouldn’t go.

Whether he’d laid awake the night before weighing the consequences, or whether he simply reached a point that morning where he couldn’t make himself do it, nobody knows for certain. When he refused, the rest of the crew refused too.

By the end of the day, 1,500 freight cars sat idle in the yards.

Pittsburgh had 33 iron mills, 73 glass factories, 29 oil refineries, and 158 coal mines; and the workers in all of them had been living through the same four years of wage cuts and tightening belts as the railroad men. When the call went out for support, they came.

The yards filled not just with railroaders but with ironworkers, miners, factory hands, and the unemployed who had been camped on the city’s outskirts for months. It stopped being a railroad strike almost immediately. It became something closer to a city uprising.

Pennsylvania’s governor, John Hartranft, faced the same problem that had paralyzed his counterparts in West Virginia and Maryland. The local militia regiment mustered on July 20; only 250 of 326 men reported for duty.

Those who showed up made clear they had no intention of moving against their neighbors. Hartranft made the decision that would detonate Pittsburgh: he sent for troops from Philadelphia.

Six hundred of them arrived on July 21, hauling cannon. They were strangers in a hostile city, under orders to clear the tracks. The crowd that met them numbered in the thousands, men, women, and children, many of them not railroad workers at all but residents who had come to see what would happen.

What happened was that the Philadelphia troops fixed bayonets and charged. The crowd responded with rocks and chunks of coal. Then someone fired a shot, no one ever established who, and the Philadelphia militia opened up on the crowd.

When the shooting stopped, more than twenty people were dead. Among them were one woman and three small children.

The crowd dispersed in panic. Then it came back, larger and angrier than before, and this time many of them were armed.

The Philadelphia troops retreated to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s roundhouse, a large circular structure used to service locomotives, and barricaded themselves inside. Several thousand people surrounded the building.

Someone in the crowd had found a cannon and positioned it within a hundred yards of the doors.

What followed was, by any reasonable definition, a siege. The troops inside concentrated fire around the cannon to keep anyone from manning it. The crowd fired back with pistols and muskets.

Then, as night fell, the strikers resolved the standoff the direct way: they set the freight yard on fire. Burning railcars loaded with whiskey and oil were rolled downhill toward the roundhouse. The fire spread to the buildings, and by dawn the soldiers felt they had no choice.

They shot their way out and fled the city on foot, running a gauntlet of furious Pittsburghers as they went.

Behind them, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s infrastructure lay in ashes. Thirty-nine buildings gone. One hundred and four locomotives destroyed. More than 1,200 freight cars reduced to charred frames. The Union Depot, the grand civic gateway of one America’s greatest industrial city, burned to the ground.

Damage estimates ran from $2 million to $5 million, the equivalent of over $160 million today. The railroad’s Pittsburgh operations had been erased.

The crowds that did it were not, as the newspapers would later suggest, a mob of criminals and vagrants. A subsequent analysis of those arrested showed representation from across Pittsburgh’s working class; nearly every ethnic group, every occupation, every neighborhood.

One historian described it as an almost perfect cross-section of the city. Another noted that the strikers themselves composed a minority of the crowds; most of the people in those yards were Pittsburgh residents who had their own grievances, their own hunger, and their own conclusions about what the Pennsylvania Railroad deserved.

Tom Scott, surveying the wreckage, had previously offered his opinion on how to handle the situation. The strikers, he said, should be given “a rifle diet for a few days and see how they like that kind of bread.”

They got the rifles. He got the ashes.

The Fire Spreads: A Nation in Revolt

Pittsburgh wasn’t the end. It was the signal.

By the time the roundhouse burned, the strike had already jumped west along the rail lines, spreading with a speed that reflected both the telegraph’s reach and the depth of working-class fury that had been accumulating for four years.

It hit cities that were ready for it; places where workers had been watching their wages fall and their hours grow, where the railroads were despised as monopolistic landlords over the arteries of commerce, where men had been reading about Martinsburg and Pittsburgh and asking themselves why not here.

The answer, in city after city, was: no reason at all.

In smaller Pennsylvania cities — Reading, Scranton, Shamokin — workers rioted, seized rail facilities, and clashed with militia units that were, by now, a known quantity: often unwilling to fire, occasionally sympathetic, and reliably insufficient.

In Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a militia company mutinied outright and marched through the town in open defiance of its orders.

Across eleven states, governors called up roughly 45,000 militia members to deal with the unrest. Federal troops followed the strikes from city to city like a fire brigade that kept arriving after the building was already gone.

In Chicago, the situation turned violent enough that the mayor assembled a force of 5,000 men — militia, police, and deputized civilians — to prevent a Pittsburgh-style inferno. It mostly worked, at a cost of nearly twenty lives and significant property damage.

Chicago avoided the wholesale destruction that Pittsburgh had suffered, but the city’s business elite drew their own conclusions about what had nearly happened.

In the weeks that followed, they organized the Commercial Club, which purchased 600 acres north of the city and built Fort Sheridan; a fortress-like Army installation designed to give state and federal forces rapid access to Chicago should the workers get ideas again.

Marshall Field, the city’s wealthiest man, donated thousands of dollars for Gatling guns and cannons to the city’s police. The Commercial Club was, in its way, a union; just one with better lawyers and access to artillery.

Meanwhile, in St. Louis, the strike became something that had no precedent in American history.

The St. Louis branch of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, a Marxist-leaning organization with roots in the First International, had been watching events unfold and moved decisively when the railroad strike reached East St. Louis on July 21.

The following day, the party’s members elected an executive committee, styled themselves the Directorate of the St. Louis Commune, and issued General Order No. 1: no freight traffic would move until workers’ demands were met.

The following morning, workers fanned out across East St. Louis and seized the rail yards, docks, and warehouse facilities. It was organized and disciplined.

That evening, roughly 500 workers crossed the Eads Bridge into St. Louis itself. They called a mass meeting at Lucas Square. An estimated 20,000 people attended. Local unions and Knights of Labor lodges joined in, and the strike spread to nearly every industry in the city; packing houses, foundries, flour mills, bakeries.

By July 24, parades of strikers up to 5,000 strong were moving through the streets, calling out shop after shop. By evening, the commerce of one of America’s great cities had been shut down entirely. Workers patrolled the streets and kept the peace. No business operated without the consent of the executive committee.

At one of the mass rallies, a black worker representing the steamboat and wharf laborers addressed the crowd. “Will you stand to us regardless of color?” he asked. The crowd roared back: “We will!”

It was the first general strike in American history. For several days, the workers of St. Louis ran the city.

Not every city wrote that story.

In Louisville, the strike dynamics played out along a very different fault line. Black sewer workers went out on strike, hoping their white counterparts would stand with them.

They didn’t. White railroad workers in Louisville largely sided with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, and some went further: forming their own militia to protect railroad property against the strikers. The same 1877, a few hundred miles away. One crowd answered “We will!” The other picked up a rifle for the company.

Both were America in 1877. The labor movement would spend the next several decades sorting out which version it wanted to be, and the answer would not always be encouraging.

Back in St. Louis, the dream had a short shelf life. Missouri’s governor wired the Secretary of War in something approaching a panic, requesting 10,000 rifles, 2,000 revolvers, a battery of artillery, and accompanying ammunition.

The request was rejected; there simply weren’t enough arms in Washington to fill it. The mayor organized a “Committee of Public Safety” in secret. Federal troops arrived, along with 5,000 deputized special police.

On July 28, they seized the Relay Depot, the executive committee’s command center, and arrested some seventy strike leaders. The wage cuts remained. One hundred and thirty-one strike leaders were fired.

The newspapers, for their part, had been reaching for the nearest available historical analogy since Pittsburgh.

The Paris Commune of 1871, in which working-class revolutionaries had seized control of the French capital for two months before being crushed by the army at a cost of roughly 10,000 lives, was only six years old. The memory was fresh, and the fear was real.

The New York Tribune called the strike “an insurrection.” The St. Louis Republican labeled it “a labor revolution.” The Pittsburgh Leader told its readers: “This may be the beginning of a great civil war in this country, between labor and capital.”

It wasn’t. But it was something. And the people who ran things were not going to forget it.

Hayes and the Federal Troops: The First Time

Rutherford Hayes was not an unsympathetic man. That’s what makes his role in 1877 worth thinking about carefully, rather than simply filing him away as a tool of the railroads.

He had served as a major general in the Union Army, been wounded four times, and entered politics with a reputation for personal honesty that was genuinely rare in the Grant era; no small achievement in an administration that had elevated corruption to something approaching an art form.

He had promised to serve only one term, and he meant it. When the strike began, his private diary entries show a man who understood the workers’ predicament. “The railroad strikers, as a rule, are good men, sober, intelligent, and industrious,” he wrote.

He asked himself whether something could be done “by education of the strikers, by judicious control of the capitalists, by wise general policy to end or diminish the evil.”

He asked the question. Then he answered it with federal troops.

On July 18, four days after the strike began in Martinsburg, Hayes issued a proclamation warning Americans against “aiding, countenancing, abetting or taking part in unlawful proceedings.”

Over the following days, as governors sent their requests, West Virginia first, then Maryland, then Pennsylvania, he complied with each one. Federal soldiers went to Martinsburg, to Baltimore, to Pittsburgh. It was the first time in American history that the federal government deployed its army against workers in a labor dispute.

Hayes was careful to frame it as a matter of restoring order rather than taking sides. He was not entirely wrong about his own intentions; he did not see himself as a strikebreaker, and he was genuinely uncomfortable with the pressure Tom Scott and the other railroad presidents were applying.

Scott complained loudly that Hayes had waited too long, that the government’s hesitation had allowed the strike to spread. Hayes, to his credit, rejected the argument. Every man, he maintained, had the right to refuse to work. No man had the right to prevent others from working.

The distinction was lawyerly, and it collapsed the moment federal troops pointed rifles at crowds of American workers. Whatever Hayes intended, what he established was a precedent, one that future presidents would not agonize over nearly as much as he did.

Grover Cleveland would invoke it during the Pullman Strike of 1894. Others would follow. Hayes had drawn the line, and he had drawn it on the side of the railroads, intentions notwithstanding.

The Tom Scott dimension of all this deserves one more look, because it is almost too neat to be true; except that it is.

Scott had been the principal architect of the Compromise of 1877, the backroom arrangement that delivered the disputed presidential election to Hayes in exchange for ending Reconstruction and pulling federal troops out of the South. Those troops were withdrawn in April 1877.

By July, they were suppressing strikes. The soldiers who had spent years enforcing the constitutional rights of black Americans in the former Confederate states were now being deployed to protect dividend payments to railroad shareholders. Scott had helped build this machinery. He then complained it wasn’t running fast enough when he needed it.

He got little sympathy from history. The strike had exposed something about the Compromise of 1877 that its architects had not advertised: the troops that left the South didn’t disappear. They just changed assignments.

By early August, the strikes had been suppressed in every city. The trains were running again. Workers returned to their jobs, mostly without raises, while strike leaders were fired and blacklisted across the industry.

The immediate demands, restore the wage cuts, abandon the double-headers, went unmet in most places. On the surface, the railroads had won.

Below the surface, something had changed. A hundred people were dead. A thousand were in jail. Tens of millions of dollars in railroad property had been destroyed.

And the men who owned the railroads, the men who ran the state governments, and the men in Washington had been given a very clear demonstration of what an unorganized, leaderless, spontaneous uprising of working people could do to the most powerful industry in the country.

The question they took away from it was not how to address the underlying conditions. The question was how to make sure it never happened again.

They had an answer. And it involved architecture.

The Castles They Built

The men who owned things in 1877 were not stupid. They understood what had happened, even if they described it in terms designed to obscure it: insurrection, communism, anarchy, the Paris Commune imported to American soil.

Strip away the rhetoric and the lesson was simple: local militia units couldn’t be trusted to suppress their own neighbors, federal troops were slow to arrive, and in the gap between those two facts, workers had nearly stopped the American economy.

The solution was not to address the conditions that produced the strike. The solution was to build castles.

Within months of the last train running again, states began reorganizing and expanding their militia forces and appropriating money for permanent armories.

The War Department authorized fortified bases for local militia units across the country in 1877, the ink barely dry on the last suppression order. Local armory boards were organized in cities from New England to the Midwest.

Wealthy private donors, who had watched Pittsburgh burn from a comfortable distance, opened their wallets with an enthusiasm they rarely showed for workers’ wages.

In Philadelphia, the First Regiment Armory went up in 1884, the Second Regiment Armory in 1895; both funded in significant part by businessmen who were quite explicit about viewing the Pennsylvania state militia as a strikebreaking force worth investing in.

The design was not subtle. The prevailing philosophy of the era held that a building should announce its purpose; a church should be welcoming, a jail should be oppressive, and an armory should look like a fortress.

So they built fortresses. Thick walls. Battlements. Narrow windows. Corner towers. The castellated style, borrowed from medieval military architecture, spread across industrial America through the 1880s and 1890s, dropping castles into the middle of working-class neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, Boston, and dozens of smaller cities.

They were not built on the edges of town, or in wealthy districts where the people funding them actually lived. They were built in industrial neighborhoods, close to the rail yards and factory floors and tenements where trouble was expected to originate.

The message was not especially coded.

Between 1886 and 1895, the two decades following the Great Upheaval, state militia forces put down 328 civil disorders across the country, concentrated heavily in the industrial states of Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, and New York.

Workers who had initially viewed their local militia units as neighbors in uniform came to see them as instruments of their employers. That perception was largely accurate, and the armories made it architectural.

You could look at the building on the corner and understand the relationship between capital and the state without reading a word of Karl Marx.

Chicago added Fort Sheridan to the equation, the 600-acre Army installation purchased by the Commercial Club to give state and federal forces a permanent rapid-response base north of the city.

Marshall Field’s Gatling gun donations to the police department completed the picture. The city’s wealthiest man had decided that the appropriate response to workers asking for a living wage was to acquire crew-served weapons. This was not considered unusual.

In New York alone, two dozen armories went up starting in the 1880s. They were often extraordinary buildings. The 7th Regiment Armory on Park Avenue became a social hub for the city’s upper classes, its interior designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

The people who built them found ways to make them beautiful. They remained, underneath the ornamentation, what they had always been: fortified installations in urban neighborhoods, designed to house armed men who could be deployed against the civilian population on short notice.

By 1905, the perceived threat of class warfare had faded enough that the castellated style began to fall out of fashion.

The Guard’s attention was shifting toward foreign wars, and the armories began to be rented out for public events, their vast drill halls among the largest unobstructed indoor spaces in most cities. The buildings that had been built to police communities gradually became community centers.

Some are now arts venues, event spaces, and gyms. The Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx is being converted into an ice skating complex.

You can decide for yourself whether that’s redemption or irony.

The labor movement drew its own conclusions from 1877, and they were more constructive than anything the railroad presidents managed. The Great Strike had been spontaneous and leaderless, which explained both its remarkable reach and its ultimate failure.

Workers everywhere had shown they could shut down the economy. They had also shown that without organization, coordination, and leadership, they couldn’t hold it.

The Knights of Labor, which had been a small and largely secret society of Philadelphia craftsmen before 1877, felt the surge of energy from the strike and understood what it meant. They formed their first national General Assembly in 1878, went public in 1882, and grew to 700,000 members by 1886.

The Bureau of Labor was established by Congress in 1884. Labor rights had become, for the first time, a genuine national political issue that neither party could entirely ignore.

The workers who struck in the summer of 1877 got nothing immediate. They went back to work without raises, watched their leaders get fired and blacklisted, and returned to the same yards and the same double-headers and the same grinding conditions that had produced the strike in the first place.

History is not always tidy about rewarding people for being right.

But they had forced a question into the open that American society would spend the next half-century trying to answer: what did working people owe the economy that depended on them, and what did that economy owe in return?

The railroad presidents thought they’d settled it when the trains started running again. They hadn’t settled anything. They’d just built some castles.

The castles are still there. Go look at one sometime, if your city has one, and there’s a reasonable chance it does. Look at the battlements, the thick walls, the narrow windows designed to repel not foreign armies but American workers.

Look at where it sits, which neighborhood it chose, whose streets it was built to control. Then consider that the men who funded it thought they were defending civilization.

Maybe they were. It depends on whose civilization you’re talking about.